Thankfully my PC decided that it would boot second time around. Windows is quite an unstable platform these days, I find.
A correspondent writes that there is now OCR software available which can recognise Arabic. It’s sold by Novodynamics of Michigan and called “Verus”. Sadly it is ridiculously expensive — $1300 for the “standard edition” and they don’t dare print a price for the “professional edition”.
An extraordinarily advanced OCR solution, VERUS™ Professional provides the most innovative Middle Eastern language and Asian optical character recognition in the world. VERUS™ Middle East Professional recognizes Arabic, Persian (Farsi, Dari), Pashto, Urdu, including embedded English and French. It also recognizes the Hebrew language, including embedded English. VERUS™ Asia Professional provides support for both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean and Russian languages, including embedded English. Both products automatically detect and clean degraded and skewed documents, automatically identify a page’s primary language, and recognize a page’s fonts without manual intervention. VERUS’™ intuitive user interface allows users to quickly review and edit recognized text.
I would imagine that it should be possible to adapt this software to recognise Syriac, if the manufacturer would agree.
I had a lot of memory problems that were making my computer unstable with Vista, which seem to have been solved by downloading a Firefox plugin/overall memory helper called “Memory Fox” and activating it for use on the whole schmole of my applications. It was practically magic.
Vista was an utter dog, mind you. And I don’t think that all the bugs got removed in Windows 7. WinXP was subjectively more stable than Win7 is.
This is good news. Do you know if there is any OCR software which can recognise Ancient Greek?
There used to be a product called Anagnostis which had a version which claimed to OCR ancient Greek, although rumour on the web said it wasn’t very good. It was too pricey for me anyway.
I also found this link on the same subject.